Are e-bike and scooter startups benefitting everyone?

One of the main complaints levied against docked bike-share systems is that they’re notoriously bad at serving low-income neighborhoods of color. The borders of Citi Bike in New York and Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., for instance, generally track along the edge of the more prosperous parts of the city, and skirt neighborhoods like East New York or Anacostia, where residents are poorer, less white, and in need of better transit options that current infrastructure provides. One of the arguments for the free-range options,. like dockless bike-share e-scooters now on the scene, was that they would change this pattern. Because they don’t require the expensive and bulky docking infrastructure that earlier bike-share iterations rely on, dockless bikes and scooters can be deployed in greater numbers, and with greater flexibility around location. Minneapolis’ Nice Ride program, one of the earliest docked bike-share systems in America, is switching to dockless for its expansion for those exact reasons. But the reality of the way dockless bikes and e-scooters are distributed often falls short of the ideal. In the Washington, D.C. area, the mobility data company Coord looked four different vehicle providers–Lime, Bird, Jump, and Skip–and analyzed how well they were serving census tracts across the socioeconomic spectrum. What Coord found, according to cofounder and CTO Jacob Baskin, was that each company followed a different pattern in how it distributed its vehicles across neighborhoods of varying income levels. Of the two scooter companies, Bird and Skip, Bird maintains a higher number of scooters in lower-income… [Read full story]